Re: [Patents] Research on Free Software Economics

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Greg reiterated:

> What he deliberately refuses to cite are these same treaties
> PROHIBITION on the copyright of ideas and processes.
>
> What he deliberately refuses to cite in addition is thirty years of
> struggling court decisions on both sides of the Atlantic trying to
> find any aspects of software that aren't idea and process.

Once more, for the collection of citations:

        BGH Betriebssystem (operating system) Decision 1990
        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bgh1-bs90/

The structure of a complex work, also called "tissue" (Gewebe) by German
courts, does not deterministically follow from any idea (including process
concepts) but is rather an outflow of individual skill and imagination.
This is necessarily so, as otherwise the complex work would have been
reduced to a simple one.  Whatever cannot be reduced to an algorithm is
individual creation.

As the BGH decision says, an operating system is, as a complex logical
structure, as adequately protected by copyright as are e.g. operating
manuals and many other types of creations, whose underlying ideas are not
copyrightable.

Moreover, this BGH decision also explains that an operation system does
not contain any technical inventions, aka teachings about physical
causality between means and effects, as these are all contained in the
hardware, which is completed before the creation of the operating system
begins.

Greg knows this decision, as I have presented it here many times.

It would be nice if someone provided a translation of

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bgh1-bs90/indexde.txt

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                          http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/